SEO : Images

Images are for the human viewer - they mean very little to a search spider, who has no "eyes".

So the spider does its best to interpret what the image looks like by indexing the image name and any additional information provided.

Note that you will often see this non-visual information in the search results. This is because the spider regards ALL text, visible or not, as page information.

Image tag

Typically the HTML code to display an image reads something like this:

which tells us:

• what image file to show
• where in the website structure it is located
• how wide and high it should be displayed

like this:

ALT tags

But a search engine spider is a text reader. It cannot see pictures.

If we want to let the spider know that the image is of a ship (and therefore leave a further indication that it's on a page about shipping) we would do this:

TITLE

You can use the Title tag instead of the ALT, or use both on the same image tag if you want, like this:

which gives us the same result as before.

If you use the same text for ALT and TITLE properties on the same image make sure the text is different (to avoid the spam detector)

eg. .... alt="shipping" title="about shipping" ....

Descriptive ALT tags

Use every opportunity to leave longer, more meaningful descriptions, like this:

<img src="pictures/95665.jpg" alt="heavy lift by AirFoyle, AN124 turbine transport" width="144" height="123" border="1" />

which the spider would read as:

but the human site visitor sees as:

This gives the search engine the opportunity to chalk up even more keywords against our page.

It is quite likely that our page will rank well if someone was searching for 'heavy lift' or 'AirFoyle' or 'AN124' or 'turbine transport', especially if the rest of our page is correctly optimized.

It may also help to include the word "image" or "graphic" in your ALT description, so that if some is searching for 'AN124 image' they get an exact match.

To go the whole nine yards we can also tell the crawler what the image is about by making its filename descriptive, like this:

<img src="pictures/heavy-cargo-AN124.jpg" alt="heavy lift by AirFoyle, AN124 turbine transport" width="144" height="123" border="1" />

which will help our chances of being ranked for keywords heavy cargo and AN124 (the type of aircraft).

	Do... name your images with keywords separated by dashes, eg. my-important-keyword.jpg use ALT tag for EVERY image, even tiny spacers or layout graphics use descriptive and truthful ALT tags to describe your images
	Don't... keyword 'stuff', ie. alt="shipping, shipping, shipping, shipping" .. you will get penalized use identical text for ALT and TITLE properties on the same image - you will get penalized.